From Recovery to Rebuilding

Charities along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast face hurdles as they seek to reconstruct the area and their organizations

Ever since Hurricane Katrina inundated East Biloxi nearly a year ago, Bill Stallworth has been

fighting to preserve the neighborhood’s working-class character.

The East Biloxi Coordination, Relief and Redevelopment Agency, which Mr. Stallworth founded, is racing to get residents back in their homes before the federal government issues new building regulations for people in hurricane-prone areas — rules the organization fears will put the cost of rebuilding out of reach for the area’s low- and moderate-income homeowners.

At the same time, the group is pushing for limits on casino and condominium development in East Biloxi. Too many pricey projects, says Mr. Stallworth, and increasing property values would force out residents unable to pay higher property taxes.

The work has been difficult, the pace demanding.

“I’m exhausted, but when I get here, I run off adrenaline,” says Mr. Stallworth, who is also a member of Biloxi’s city council. “I don’t stop long enough to reflect. When I think about all that we’ve done, the people that we’ve lost, the panic and worry, I don’t like thinking about it, so I just don’t.”

Putting Life Back on Course

The hurricane still dominates everyday life along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, as much for nonprofit organizations as for anyone else.

Many charities are working in temporary offices as they try to repair or rebuild facilities lost in the storm. Local sources of financial support have dropped or, in some cases, vanished completely. Groups have lost employees who moved out of the area, and those who have stayed are struggling to put their own lives back together.

Yet despite the trying conditions, local organizations are working to re-establish social services that were hit hard by the storm and are playing key roles in the region’s recovery. After nearly a year in the frenetic emergency phase of the disaster, charities are now getting ready for the more complex challenge: rebuilding the Gulf Coast, an effort widely expected to take as long as a decade.

And when local nonprofit leaders look at the years of work still to come, they are by turns optimistic, overwhelmed, energized, weary, and resolute.

Mr. Stallworth worries about how his start-up organization will find the money it needs to hire employees so it won’t have to rely solely on volunteers, where it will find permanent quarters — the group currently operates out of donated space at a church — and what will happen when the flow of volunteers slows. He rues the amount of time it took to get his wife back into their home — a delay caused in part by the hours he put into helping others — and fears that the rest of the country will forget about the region’s plight.

But just a few minutes after considering the many concerns weighing on his mind, Mr. Stallworth begins to talk about his optimism about the future. “I see miracles every day,” he says. “Somebody’s really in need and they’ve asked for your help, and you don’t know where it’s coming from. I can walk out of this place, and before I can get too far, somebody will drive down the street, some group will call me, and they’ve got just what I need.”

Housing Shortages

Without a doubt, the biggest issue facing the Gulf Coast right now is housing.

Hurricane Katrina and its accompanying storm surge were so powerful that they lifted homes off their foundations, sweeping some out to sea. Thousands of structures that survived the disaster had water damage so severe that they had to be gutted, sanitized to clean up mold, and then rebuilt.

Nearly 100,000 people in the state of Mississippi are still living in some 37,000 trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Working with two national housing groups — Enterprise Community Partners, in Columbia, Md., and NeighborWorks America, in Washington — the Enterprise Corporation of the Delta, a community-development organization in Jackson, Miss., is spearheading an effort to help 35 poor people build new homes in Pass Christian, Miss., a coastal town a little more than 20 miles west of Biloxi.

The Home Again program includes both traditionally built and prefabricated houses, the parts for which are made in a factory, transported, and then assembled on the homeowner’s property.

In addition to providing grants and loans to cover the gap between the cost of rebuilding and the money that homeowners have in savings, insurance settlements, and other assistance, the program also offers counseling to help them navigate the steps involved in rebuilding, such as obtaining necessary permits and working with contractors.

Joseph K. McKay is one of the people who is rebuilding through the Home Again program. A lifetime resident of Pass Christian, he has been through many storms. The house that he built with his father and uncle took in 18 inches of water during the storm of 1947, and had to be rebuilt after Hurricane Camille in 1969. Katrina picked up his house and dropped it on his neighbor’s home.

Without the help of the Home Again program, Mr. McKay doesn’t think that he would have been able to start over. At age 89, the prospect was too daunting.

“You stay awake many a night,” he says. “You can’t go to sleep. You get to thinking about what you’ve lost, how long it’s going to take you to get back where you were. It’s a blow.”

Work started on the program’s first six homes last month. On a scorching Tuesday morning, trucks carrying the two halves of what will be Mr. McKay’s new home lumbered down narrow Henderson Avenue. Within just a few hours, a crane operator had maneuvered the second half onto the foundation, which is elevated on 10-foot pilings.

Bill Bynum, chief executive officer of the Enterprise Corporation of the Delta, recognizes that building 35 houses — while incredibly important to people who move into them — does very little to solve the state’s crushing housing problem.

Instead, he says, the chief goal of the Home Again program is to influence the way the state government meets the needs of poor people who lost their homes — and the way it spends the billions of dollars Congress has appropriated for rebuilding.

Mr. Bynum hopes that the project will demonstrate the importance of gap financing — to make up the difference between the money a homeowner has and the cost of reconstruction — and counseling to help homeowners through the rebuilding process, as well as the role that prefabricated housing could play in speeding up reconstruction.

If the government doesn’t focus more attention and resources on low-cost housing, says Mr. Bynum, a significant opportunity to improve the lives of poor people in the region will have been lost.

“It’s quite possible that they could be even further marginalized if we don’t do what we should as a country,” he says.

Frayed Safety Net

Definite holes remain in the region’s network of social services.

When Loaves and Fishes resumed its lunchtime feeding program for the homeless in January, the small, grass-roots organization in East Biloxi also started preparing bagged meals its guests could take with them for dinner. The nearby shelter that before had served a hot evening meal was destroyed in the hurricane.

Six homeless people who had sought refuge in the shelter died during the storm. One man didn’t have any family to claim his body, so Rita W. Baldwin — who was homeless herself seven years ago and now serves as coordinator of Loaves and Fishes — recently claimed his remains.

The Mississippi Gulf Coast didn’t have a lot of services for the homeless before the storm, and the picture is even bleaker now, says Ms. Baldwin. In addition to the shelter that was destroyed in East Biloxi, another one in Gulfport, run by the Salvation Army, has yet to reopen.

After Katrina, Loaves and Fishes lost the $24,000 allocation it usually receives from the city of Biloxi, and contributions from local donors have “dwindled to practically nothing,” says Ms. Baldwin. Before the storm, she says, six local churches provided regular financial contributions. Now that number is down to three.

But, paradoxically, the organization’s finances are in better shape than they have ever been, due in large part to contributions from relief organizations working in the region. World Vision gave $25,000 to replace damaged kitchen equipment and to help cover the rent. AmeriCares and Islamic Relief were among the other organizations to make donations.

Ms. Baldwin is grateful for the help, but wary about what lies ahead.

“I’m beginning to have some nightmares about the whole thing,” she says. “If those traditional sources don’t start coming back in, then we’re going to be in trouble, because they’re not going to keep sending us relief money.”

‘Building Back Better’

While the hurricane still presents daily hurdles to nonprofit groups and many face the considerable challenge of rebounding from damage caused by the storm, some organizations see an opportunity to come out of the recovery process stronger than they were before the storm.

Hurricane Katrina destroyed Boys & Girls clubs in Biloxi, Gulfport, and Pass Christian; dedicated space in a school in Bay St. Louis; and administrative offices.

Two other school sites were damaged, but survived.

But as local school districts reopened after the storm, Boys & Girls Clubs of the Gulf Coast resumed its programs in school facilities.

This summer volunteers from across the country have been providing special programs for the kids to give them as much of a break from the school environment as possible.

Last month, for example, volunteers from the Hands On Network, a national community-service organization, worked with children in Biloxi for a week to paint a colorful mural on the side of a paint store. Other groups have held special sports camps and sponsored field trips.

As Boys & Girls Clubs of the Gulf Coast strives to provide activities and a safe environment for children, the organization is also looking ahead.

The charity plans to rebuild the clubs it lost as community centers that would house other social-service organizations along with the Boys & Girls Club, with the groups sharing facilities like gymnasiums and kitchens.

Daniel Libeskind, the New York architect chosen to develop the master plan for the new World Trade Center, donated his services to design a new club in the Forest Heights neighborhood in Gulfport, and the Rockworks Foundation has committed to raising the money necessary for its construction.

The new approach is a key component of the organization’s goal of “building back better” so it can serve more youngsters and bring families and other members of the community into contact with its programs, says Sue Reed, the group’s executive director.

But, she is quick to point out, the organization would not be able to think so ambitiously without the help of its national organization.

Through a hurricane fund established soon after the disaster, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, in Atlanta, has provided financial assistance to clubs along the coast to help cover operating expenses for this year and much of next year.

“That helps us to concentrate on how we’re going to rebuild,” says Ms. Reed, “so we don’t have to worry about where the next dollar’s coming to meet the payroll.”

The Mississippi Center for Justice, a nonprofit legal group in Jackson, has played an important role in the recovery effort by coordinating pro bono legal assistance to hurricane survivors by lawyers across the country.

But the center is also collaborating with the Enterprise Corporation of the Delta to raise money for a project the groups had talked about before the storm and decided would be even more important after it: a policy center to analyze the impact of state budget and tax decisions on low-income residents.

“The absence of data and information about what goes on with the state budget is pretty dramatic here,” says Martha Bergmark, executive director of the Mississippi Center for Justice. “So just opening a window of attention on how these things work would begin to make it possible to get stories out in the media, to make a case to policy makers of how it might be different.”

So far the two organizations have raised money for the Mississippi Economic Policy Center from the Annie E. Casey and W.K. Kellogg Foundations and the Open Society Institute. Ms. Bergmark says that her organization realized quickly that Hurricane Katrina was an event — “not unlike the civil-rights movement itself” — that had the capacity to focus attention and generate much-needed financial resources for the region.

“We were under an obligation to seize that opportunity,” she says.

A Massive Challenge

Meanwhile, such issues seem like far-off concerns to people like Mary Ellen Calvert, chairwoman and until recently executive director of the Harrison County Long Term Recovery Coalition, a group of more than 70 local and national organizations working on the county’s recovery.

After a disaster, long-term recovery organizations, like the coalition, are typically established to coordinate volunteer and skilled labor for home rebuilding and to act as a “funder of last resort.”

If an individual or family still has unmet needs after their case manager has exhausted all the government and nonprofit programs the client qualifies for, the case goes to the long-term recovery organization to see if they can get additional help there.

The coalition is making progress. It hired a new executive director and a construction manager, both of whom started August 1, and the organization has applied for a $10-million grant from the Mississippi Hurricane Recovery Fund set up by the state’s governor. But Ms. Calvert estimates that the coalition still has 7 to 10 years of work ahead and that when it’s all said and done, it will have handled more than 5,000 cases of unmet needs.

Looking forward, she says, is overwhelming.

“Right now we’re still in the one-day-at-a-time mode, let’s do what we can today, let’s help the people we can today, but that’s quickly going to change. I’ve got to do some projections, and I’ve got to really try to figure out how we can …” says Ms. Calvert, her voice trailing off midsentence.

A moment later she starts again, “We’re not going to be able to help everybody. That’s the bottom line that hurts my heart.”